Lonesome Onry and Mean: Other Uses for Best In Texas Besides, You Know, Reading It

​Lonesome Onry and Mean recently stopped wasting good notebook paper writing drafts of articles about Best in Texas Music Magazine. We were perusing the current issue and thinking about how bad it is when it suddenly dawned on us: the environmentally pure thing would be to write a column about it on the issue itself. Another little facet of LOM's continuing attempt at going green, you might say.

When I floated a trial balloon of my new idea at our local watering hole, the usual suspects started chiming in with other environmentally friendly uses of BIT. There were the obvious ones, of course: toilet paper in a pinch; drop cloth when painting; bird cage liner; fly swatter; campfire starter; wrapping breakables when you move (one virulent wag noted that hopefully if you are an avid reader of BIT, you're moving out of state); oil change rags; pirate's hat; origami.

After a few beers, things got weird: send to Alaska for use in their next oil spill; cover the windows of your meth lab if you run out of tin foil; serve crawfish on it (although another wag who hails from Dublin stated authoritatively that BIT is not strong enough for genuine Irish fish 'n' chips); Molotov cocktail wick; cut out letters and use for your next ransom note; stack them up for use in ballistics tests.

One local musician who frequents the establishment then asked LOM, "Why are you still doing columns on that pile of crap? They aren't fooling anybody. Everyone knows it's a joke."
Well, that got LOM to pondering. But it didn't take long to come up with an answer.
If BIT came into my mailbox every Tuesday along with all the other ads for Comcast, AT&T, Bed Bath and Beyond, Randall's and Fiesta, we don't think we'd have any problem with it. We could just throw it in our recycling along with the other junk mail.
But BIT isn't distributed like the junk advertisement that it is. It's there on Houston news racks next to the Chronicle and the Press, disguised as a newspaper - a supposed source of useful information.
BIT presents itself as journalism, not as a marketing tool of Shane Media.
LOM is fine with RuPaul impersonating a woman, but not with BIT impersonating a newspaper. Nor are we OK with BIT presenting itself as the voice of (and for) Texas music anymore than we are with someone hijacking an airplane with our loved ones on it.
So LOM will probably continue to rant about BIT. In fact, the current Charlie Robison issue is so blatantly, insultingly ludicrous and so surreptitiously right-wing in its politics, it may be good for two or three columns over the next week or so. So check back with us occasionally as we examine faux-country dipstick Austin Cunningham's "Guns and Religion," publisher Ed Shane's mind-numbing monthly letter of circular logic and some music reviews that couldn't make the cut at most high-school newspapers.
We might even examine BIT's tie-in with radio wacko Michael Berry and one of the most mind-numbingly banal radio programs ever conceived.